by Ilya Ilf
After the eighth mug Kozlevich ordered a ninth, raised it high above his head, sucked on his conductor’s mustache, and asked excitedly:
“So there’s no God?”
“No,” answered Ostap.
“No? Well, to our health then.”
And that’s how he continued drinking, preceding each new mug with:
“Is there God? No? To our health then.”
Panikovsky drank along with everybody else but kept mum on the subject of God. He didn’t want to get involved in a controversy.
The return of the prodigal son, and the Antelope, gave the Chernomorsk Branch of the Arbatov Bureau for the Collection of Horns and Hoofs the glamor it had been lacking. The car was always waiting by the door of what used to be the five-merchant commune. It wasn’t quite the same as a blue Buick or a stretch Lincoln, of course, or even a little Ford coupe, but it was still a car, an automobile, a vehicle which, in Ostap’s words, despite all its flaws, could occasionally move around without the aid of horses.
Ostap immersed himself in his work. Had he devoted all his energies to the collection of horns or hoofs, the manufacturers of cigarette holders and combs would likely have had enough supplies to last them through the end of the current fiscal century. But the Branch President was involved in something totally different.
Having finished with both Funt and Berlaga, whose stories were very informative but hadn’t lead directly to Koreiko, Ostap determined that, in the interests of business, he would make friends with Zosya Sinitsky and clear up a few things about Alexander Ivanovich—well, not as much about him as about his finances—in between polite kisses under a dark acacia tree. But a lengthy surveillance conducted by the Vice President for Hoofs revealed that there was no love between Zosya and Koreiko, and that the latter, as Shura put it, was just wasting his moves.
“Where there’s no love,” Ostap commented with a sigh, “there’s no talk of money. Let’s forget about the girl for now.”
And while Koreiko recalled the charlatan in a police cap and his pathetic attempt at third-rate blackmail with a smile, the Branch President was racing all over town in a yellow car, looking for people great and small that the millionaire clerk had long forgotten about. But they remembered him very well. A few times, Ostap called Moscow and spoke to a businessman he knew, who was an expert on commercial secrets. The branch had begun receiving letters and telegrams that Ostap quickly separated from the bulk of the mail, which still largely consisted of urgent invitations, requests for horns, and admonishments over the slow rate of hoof collection. Some of those letters and telegrams went straight into the folder with shoelace straps.
In late July, Ostap set out on a trip to the Caucasus. Business required that the grand strategist make a personal visit to a small grape-growing republic.
On the day of the President’s departure, the branch was rocked by a scandal. Panikovsky was issued thirty rubles to purchase a ticket at the port and came back within thirty minutes, drunk, with no ticket and no money left. He didn’t offer any excuses; he just pulled out his pockets, which made them look as if they belonged on a pool table, and laughed incessantly. Everything made him laugh, whether it was the captain’s wrath, or Balaganov’s reproachful expression, or the samovar that was entrusted to him, or Funt, who was dozing off at his desk with the panama hat covering his nose. But when Panikovsky’s eyes fell on the deer antlers—the pride and joy of the office, he cracked up so hard that he fell on the floor and soon fell asleep with a happy smile on his purple lips.
“Now we have all the attributes of a real organization,” said Ostap, “even our own embezzler, who also doubles as the boozer doorman. The presence of these two characters gives all our undertakings a solid footing.”
While Ostap was away, Fathers Moroszek and Kuszakowski appeared at the bureau several times. At the sight of the priests, Kozlevich would hide in the farthest corner of the office. The priests would open the door, peek inside, and quietly call out:
“Pan Kozlewicz! Pan Kozlewicz! Do you hear the voice of our Heavenly Father? Come to your senses, Pan!”
And Father Kuszakowski would point his finger toward the heavens, while Father Moroszek would work his rosary beads. Then Balaganov would confront the clerics and silently show them his flame-colored fist. The priests would retreat, casting a few wistful looks at the Antelope.
Ostap returned two weeks later. The entire staff came to greet him at the port. From his perch atop the tall black wall of the docking ship, the grand strategist looked at his subordinates with warmth and kindness. He had a whiff of roasted young lamb and excellent Georgian wine about him.
In addition to the secretary, who had been hired even before Ostap went away, two young men in heavy boots were also waiting at the Chernomorsk branch. They were agriculture students who had been sent to do internships.
“Oh, great!” said Ostap unenthusiastically. “The new generation is stepping in. But here, my dear comrades, you’ll have to work very hard. I’m sure you know that horns, or pointed projections covered with either fur or hard fibers, represent outgrowths of the skull, and are found primarily in mammals?”
“We know that,” said the students firmly, “we just need to do the internship.”
The way he got rid of the students was complex and rather expensive. The grand strategist sent them to the steppes of Kalmykia to organize collection outposts. It cost the Bureau 600 rubles, but there was no other choice: the students would have been in the way of finishing the project, which was moving forward so nicely.
When Panikovsky found out how much was spent on the students, he took Balaganov aside and whispered angrily:
“And me, I don’t get to go on business trips. I don’t get vacation either. I need to go to the Yessentuki resort, to take care of my health. I get no days off and no work clothes. No, Shura, I don’t like it here. Actually, I heard the pay at the Hercules is better. I’m going to go and be a messenger over there. As God is my witness, I am!”
In the evening, Ostap summoned Berlaga once again.
“On your knees!” shouted Ostap the moment he saw the accountant, sounding like Tsar Nicholas I.
The conversation itself, however, was quite amicable and went on for two hours. After it was over, Ostap ordered the Antelope to wait outside the Hercules the next morning.
CHAPTER 18
ON LAND AND AT SEA
Comrade Sardinevich arrived at the beach with a personalized briefcase. A silver business card, with a folded corner and a lengthy engraving in italics, was attached to it, and this card attested to the fact that Yegor Sardinevich had already celebrated five years of service at the Hercules.
He had a clean, open, gallant face, like that of the shaving Englishman from the ads. Sardinevich paused in front of the board where the water temperature was marked in chalk and then moved on to look for a good spot, his feet getting stuck in the hot sand.
The beachgoers’ camp was crowded. Its makeshift structures rose in the morning, only to disappear at sunset, leaving behind the usual urban litter in the sand: shriveled melon peels, eggshells, and scraps of newspaper, which then proceed to lead a secret nocturnal life on the beach, whispering about this and that and flying around under the cliffs.
Sardinevich struggled past little huts made of waffle weave towels, past umbrellas and sheets stretched between tall stakes. Young women in skimpy swim skirts were hiding underneath. Most of the men were also wearing swimsuits, but not all. Some wore nothing but fig leaves, and even those covered not the private parts of the gentlemen of Chernomorsk but rather their noses—to prevent them from peeling. Having clad themselves in this way, the men were lying in the most uninhibited positions. Occasionally, they would cover their private parts with a hand, go into the water for a quick dip, and hurry back to the comfortable hollows made in the sand by their bodies, so as not to miss a single cubic inch of the curative sun bath.
The dearth of clothing on these people was more than compensated for by a gent
leman of a totally different type. He wore leather boots with buttons, formal trousers, and a fully buttoned-up jacket, along with a stiff collar, a necktie, a pocket watch chain, and a fedora. A thick mustache, and the cotton that was stuck into his ears, completed this man’s appearance. Next to him was a cane with a glass knob that was protruding vertically from the sand.
He suffered greatly from the heat. His collar was soaked with sweat. His armpits were as hot as a blast furnace, hot enough to smelt ore. Nevertheless, he continued to lie there, motionless. There’s a man like this on every beach in the world. Nobody knows who he is, why he’s here, or why he’s lying in the sand in full dress uniform. But these people are out there, one for every beach. Maybe they are members of some clandestine League of Fools, or the remnants of the once powerful Rosicrucian Order, or half-crazed bachelors—who knows . . .
Yegor Sardinevich settled next to the member of the League of Fools and quickly took off his clothes. Sardinevich naked looked nothing like Sardinevich dressed. His gaunt English head sat on a white, feminine body with sloping shoulders and very broad hips. Yegor approached the water, tested it with his foot, and squealed. Then he put his other foot into the water and squealed again. Then he took several steps forward, plugged his ears with his thumbs, covered his eyes with his index fingers, closed his nostrils with his middle fingers, emitted a heart-wrenching shriek, and dunked himself four times in a row. Only after this elaborate procedure did he start swimming, paddling with his arms and turning his head up with every stroke. The rippling waters embraced Yegor Sardinevich, a model Herculean and an outstanding activist. Five minutes later, when the tired activist turned onto his back and his globular gut started rocking on the waves, the sound of the Antelope’s maxixe came from the bluff above the beach.
Out stepped Ostap Bender, Balaganov, and the accountant Berlaga, whose face expressed full acceptance of his fate. All three of them climbed down to the beach and began searching for someone, peering unceremoniously into people’s faces.
“These are his pants,” said Berlaga finally, stopping in front of the pile of clothing that belonged to the unsuspecting Sardinevich. “He’s probably far out in the sea.”
“I’ve had it!” exclaimed the grand strategist. “I’m not waiting any longer. We’re forced to take action both on land and at sea.”
He slipped out of his suit and shirt, revealing his swim trunks, and marched into the water, waving his arms. On his chest, the grand strategist had a gunpowder-blue tattoo of short-armed Napoleon in a tricorne, holding a beer mug in his hand.
“Balaganov!” called Ostap from the water. “Undress Berlaga and get him ready. I might need him.”
With that, the grand strategist swam away on his side, splitting the waters with his bronze shoulder and charting a north-northeasterly course, toward the pearly belly of Yegor Sardinevich.
Before submerging himself in the ocean’s depths, Ostap had worked hard on dry land. The trail had led the grand strategist to the golden letters of the Hercules, and that was where he had been spending most of his time. He was no longer amused by rooms with alcoves and sinks, or by the statues, or the doorman in a cap with a golden zigzag who liked to gab about the fiery ritual of cremation.
Berlaga’s desperate and muddled testimony brought to light the semi-executive figure of Comrade Sardinevich. At the Hercules, he occupied a large room with two windows, the kind of room once favored by foreign boat captains, lion tamers, and rich students from Kiev.
Two telephones rang in the room often and irritably, sometimes separately, sometimes together. But nobody answered the calls. Even more often, the door would crack open, a closely cropped bureaucratic head would pop in, glance around perplexed, and disappear, only to make way for the next head, this one not closely cropped but with a mane of wild stiff hair, or simply bald and purple, like an onion. But the onion skull wouldn’t linger in the doorway either. The room was empty.
When the door opened for perhaps the fiftieth time that day, it was Bender who peeked into the room. Like everybody else, he turned his head from left to right and from right to left and, like everybody else, realized that Comrade Sardinevich was not in. Expressing his displeasure brazenly, the grand strategist started making the rounds of the departments, units, sections, and offices, inquiring about Comrade Sardinevich everywhere. And, everywhere, the answer was always the same: “He was here just a moment ago,” or, “He just left.”
The semi-executive Yegor was one of those office dwellers who either “were here just a moment ago” or “have just left.” Some of them never even make it to their office during the entire workday. At 9 A.M. sharp, a person like this enters the building and, with the best of intentions, lifts his foot in order to put it on the first step. Great deeds await him. His schedule includes eight important appointments and two big meetings and a small one, all in his office. On his desk, there’s a stack of papers, all requiring urgent action. There’s so much to do and so little time. So this executive, or semi-executive, purposefully lifts his foot toward the first marble step. But setting it down is not that simple. “Comrade Parusinov, just one second,” someone coos, “I just wanted to go over one small issue with you.” Parusinov is gently taken by the arm and led into a corner. From this moment on, the executive—or the semi-executive—is a complete loss to the country. He’s been taken over. The moment he clears up the small issue and runs three steps up, he’s picked up again, taken to the window, or into a dark hallway, or to a secluded nook where the messy head of maintenance left some empty boxes lying around. People explain things to him, request things, urge him to do something, and plead with him to resolve certain matters urgently. By 3 P.M., and against all the odds, he finally makes it up the first flight of stairs. By 5 P.M., he even manages to break through to the second floor. But as his own office is on the third floor, and the workday is already over, he promptly runs downstairs and leaves the building, in order to make it to an urgent regional meeting. Meanwhile, the phones in his office are ringing off the hook, the scheduled appointments fall through, and his correspondence remains unanswered, while the attendees of the two big and one small meetings drink tea peacefully and chat about problems with public transportation.
The case of Yegor Sardinevich was particularly acute because of the extracurricular activities to which he dedicated himself with far too much zeal. He was especially adept at exploiting the universal mutual fraud that had somehow become the norm at the Hercules, which was for some reason referred to as extracurricular duties.
Sometimes the Herculeans would spend three straight hours in these meetings, listening to Sardinevich’s demeaning blather.
They were all dying to grab Yegor by his plump thighs and throw him out a window from a considerable height. Sometimes they even felt that all extracurricular activities everywhere have always been a fiction, even though they were aware of some real activities of this kind taking place outside the Hercules. “What an asshole,” they thought dejectedly, fiddling with pencils and teaspoons, “a goddamn phony!” But catching Sardinevich, and exposing him, was beyond their reach. Yegor gave all the right speeches about Soviet society, cultural pursuits, continuing education, and amateur art clubs. But there wasn’t anything real behind this passionate rhetoric. Fifteen of his clubs, dedicated to politics, music, and the performing arts, had all been developing strategic plans for the past two years. And the local branches of various societies—whose goals were to advance aviation, knowledge of chemistry, automotive transportation, equestrian sports, highway construction, as well as the prompt eradication of ethnic chauvinism—existed only in the sick imagination of the local union committee. As for the school of continuing education, of which Sardinevich was especially proud, it was constantly reorganizing itself, which, as anybody knows, means it wasn’t undertaking any useful activity whatsoever. If Sardinevich were an honest man, he would probably have admitted that all these activities were essentially a mirage. But the local union committee used this mirage to
concoct its reports, so at the next level up nobody doubted the existence of all those musico-political clubs. At that level, the school of continuing education was imagined as a large stone building filled with desks, where perky teachers draw graphs that show the rise of unemployment in the United States on their chalkboards, while mustachioed students develop political consciousness right in front of your eyes. Out of this entire ring of volcanic extracurricular activity that Sardinevich built around the Hercules, only two fire-breathers were active: The Chairman’s Voice newsletter, which Sardinevich and Bomze put together during work hours each month, and a plywood board with a sign that read THOSE WHO QUIT DRINKING AND CHALLENGE OTHERS, but there wasn’t a single name listed on it.
Bender was sick and tired of chasing Sardinevich around the Hercules. The grand strategist couldn’t catch up with the distinguished activist no matter what. Sardinevich eluded him every time. He had just been talking on the phone in the union committee room,. The earpiece was still warm, while the shiny black receiver still had the mist of his breath on it. Elsewhere, a man with whom Sardinevich had just been talking was still sitting on the window sill. Once Ostap even saw the reflection of Sardinevich in a stairwell mirror. He leaped forward, but the mirror promptly emptied, and it only reflected the window and a distant cloud.
“Holy Mother of Divine Interception!” exclaimed Ostap, trying to catch his breath. “What a useless, disgusting bureaucracy! Of course, our Chernomorsk Branch is not without its flaws, all those little deficiencies and inefficiencies, but it’s nothing like here at the Hercules . . . Right, Shura?”
The Vice President for Hoofs emitted a deep pump-like sigh. They were back in the cool second-floor hallway where they had been some fifteen times before. And so, for the fifteenth time that day, they walked past the wooden bench that stood outside Polykhaev’s office.